What's so special about this vintage cookbook?
This is the first edition of a handwritten cookbook from the Zhovkiv region, which was compiled by a young lady - Hennusia Doloshytska during the years 1907-1909.
You won't find dishes here that are familiar to Ukrainian cuisine: varenyky, holubtsi, borscht. Probably because almost every Ukrainian housewife knew how to cook them without any recipes. Instead, the book presents dishes of refined, even aristocratic Ukrainian cuisine at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries: violet syrup, almond soup (served on Holy Eve, but without milk), rye cake (using rose petal syrup), cinnamon cake, macaroni cake. The old Ukrainian kitchen is depicted here, which does not fit into the framework of our imagination.
The book "Records of Mother's Recipes", like the previous old cookbooks of the "Author's Ukrainian Kitchen" project, is full of warmth, coziness, melancholy, and a sense of home. And it is not only a matter of language, of old words and expressions. The presentation of the text, which you will not come across in modern cookbooks, also deserves special attention. The atmosphere of the book is enhanced by wonderfully preserved photos from the family archive of the Doloshytskyi-Vynnychuk family and the author's illustrations, made in the original technique by the Lviv-based graphic artist Ihor Bilykivskyi.
Since the author compiled the book for herself and for the next generations of the family, the text has not been edited by anyone before, and it preserves the colloquial "living" language of the time of writing the book. This, in fact, is another treasure - a linguistic monument!
